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Professor Peter Tillers of Cardozo Law School in New York blogs for JURIST on the latest evidence issues...
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Saturday, September 13, 2003

Fairy Tales for Grownups:

Living on Earth, the public radio program on which announcers discuss, in sonorous voices, matters such as the problem of the overabundance of non-native starlings in the Northwest and the earth-conscious preparations of bee populations for the coming of winter. All is well but all is not well. ("If only we could get those darned starlings to go back home, somewhere in Europe, where they belong! Sigh.... Well, at least the peregrine falcons will prosper. ... [pause] ... Next week, our program on a special kind of vegetarianism: one farmer who decided that he and his family don't need meat or leather.")
Posted by Peter Tillers at 4:16 AM
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Friday, September 12, 2003

Background Evidence ...

isn't always what you think it is. Consider

... "social background .....

.... evidence."

I'll bet that the first two words in this verbal trio tripped you up: I'll bet you thought you were going to read about background evidence with a social flavor. But in fact when you encounter this label -- "rotten social background evidence" -- in a criminal trial, you are more likely to encounter evidence about a person's (rotten) social background -- and such evidence about background may not be background evidence 'tall. See generally Mythri A. Jayaraman, "Rotten Social Background Revisited," 14 Cap. Def. J. 327 (2002).

P.S. The pedant in me thought you might want to know.

P.P.S. Isn't the title of Jayaraman's article delicious?

P.P.P.S. And don't you think it's time for the publication of a legal treatise with the title Rotten Social Background Evidence? The book would be a best seller -- if, at least, there were a pinch of humor in the tome. And the book could not fairly fail in the scholarly community either: the author could always say (justly), "But I promised you rotten evidence. And I delivered. What's your beef? It takes skill and intelligence to craft consistent nonsense." And you, the expert in criminal evidence (or a similarly-nomenclatured field) might only be able to respond with a splutter -- unless, that is, you are juvenile enough (sufficiently open-minded?) to be surprised (and perturbed) by the law's verbal quirks. Criminal law indeed!

Posted by Peter Tillers at 1:11 PM
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Monday, September 08, 2003

September 11

I am watching a program on the building of the World Trade Center. I look forward to September 11 with dread. (The weather is almost as beautiful now as it was on the original September 11.) I hope that the building of the replacement for the Twin Towers begins next summer. That will be a glorious sight.

Posted by Peter Tillers at 7:26 PM
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Professor Peter Tillers

"I have practiced a little bit of law -- I worked as a litigator, once in California and once in Texas -- but for most of my professional life I have studied and taught law.

In the early part of my academic career I dabbled in philosophy, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. But as I matured, I came to my senses. This explains why during the last 15 years I have devoted much more attention to evidence, inference, and proof in litigation than to German Idealism and similar matters. However, I did not succeed in completely obliterating the influence of philosophy and epistemology on my thinking. Thus, in my effort to understand and explain the process of proof in litigation, I have devoted a great deal of attention to matters such as probability theory and theories of evidence, inference, induction, and proof.

Peter Tillers is Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University. He revised volumes 1 &1A of Wigmore on Evidence (1983) and is the author of Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence (1988; with E. Green).